


Whumptober 2020 18 Panic Attack

by frankie_mcstein



Series: Whumptober 2020 [18]
Category: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Panic Attack, Protective boys, Whumptober 2020, episode tag for 2.03, poor Higgins, silly pranks, vague backstory, waterboarding aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:02:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27081628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frankie_mcstein/pseuds/frankie_mcstein
Summary: Whumptober 2020 prompt 18- Panic AttackIt wasn't their fault. They were just playing a prank on Magnum. They didn't know what Sam and Lina had done to her. They had no idea that the water crashing down over her would be so much more than she could handle
Relationships: Juliet Higgins & Everyone
Series: Whumptober 2020 [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947172
Comments: 30
Kudos: 54





	Whumptober 2020 18 Panic Attack

**Author's Note:**

> Yep, it's another play in 2.03. I'm sorry, but my darling was waterboarded and still kept Magnum's name to herself and I'm all kinds of annoyed that this was literally never addressed.

Higgins had never been graceful when being startled. When two of the boys in her class had decided it would be a funny April Fools prank to slip out of their chairs and poke various other students in the side, nine-year-old Juliet had, without thinking, smacked one of them so hard the resulting nose bleed had seen him sent home. One Halloween, when her half-brother had jumped out at her wearing a rubber mask, fourteen-year-old Juliet had, quite instinctively, shoved twenty-six-year-old Charlie down the stairs and into the bowl of sweets waiting for the trick-or-treaters.

After she had started her physical training with MI6, her hand-to-hand combat skills had made it both better and worse. Better because she genuinely felt it gave her a stronger measure of control over her reactions. Worse because now, if she did react unconsciously, muscle memory meant she could do some real damage. 

She had let Richard talk her into going to an American-style haunted house once, a few months after he had proposed. He knew she tended more towards fight than flight, but he assured her it was strictly no-contact and that he would hold her hand the entire time. So, of course, that was the night a new hire decided no-contact was boring. He had taken to lurking the corridors between the rooms and grabbing at people's arms or lying on the floor and gripping their ankles.

Higgins had stamped on his hand hard enough to hear bones break. The resulting fuss had led to her threatening to press assault charges against the young idiot, a threat that his boss backed to the hilt. Richard had never suggested they do anything to mark the end of October again.

And now she was sharing an address with a man who seemed, in some ways, to be a perennial child. His friends weren't much better. Her natural, perfectly healthy paranoia had been ramped up by Sam and Lina. She hadn’t said anything to anyone about it, preferring not to have people fussing. In fact, she was pretty sure no one except Katsumoto actually knew what the mercenaries had done to her.

So the run up to Halloween had seen her worrying as her boys spent weeks discussing the various ‘prank scares’ they had pulled off over the years. Rick seemed particularly taken with the year he had somehow concealed himself beneath Magnum's cot and woken him by jabbing his finger up through the canvas. Magnum, groggy and confused, had looked down to see hands reaching around the sides of his bed. Apparently the resulting scream had woken half the camp.

Higgins really hadn't cared if the boys wanted to play tricks on each other; after everything life had put them through, they deserved to seize any opportunity to laugh that they could possibly get. But she did care if their desire to prove to her that she was a member of their family now led to them trying to scare her and getting hurt as a result.

The trouble was that she didn’t know how to say 'please don't scare me, I don't like it' without it sounding like she was a weak little fool. She'd had to deal with enough people doubting her capabilities already. The last thing she wanted was to actively encourage her boys to start viewing her as some sort of damsel.

"Might I play the part of the voice of reason?" She had been careful to keep her voice just this side of disinterested. "As you know, the main building is home to many priceless pieces of Mr. Masters' collection, several of which are genuinely irreplaceable. With that in mind, I strongly suggest you confine your juvenile antics to the guest house, where you can be sure the immaturity will be properly appreciated." She’d smiled as she'd spoken, taking the sting out of the words. 

"No worries, Jules." All three men had been wearing matching grins, but it was Rick who answered her. "We don't wanna do anything to risk upsetting Robin."

There was something on the way he said it, some slight stress on Robin's name, that had made her think it wasn't Robin they were worried about. But, before she could do more than narrow her eyes, T.C. had suddenly burst out laughing.

"Remember when we sewed Nuzo into his sleeping bag and told him we had done it to trap the snake that had slithered in there with him?"

Higgins couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at that, but her boys were all laughing uproariously. She supposed you just had to be there and excused herself from the conversation, happy in the knowledge that she wasn’t going to spend Halloween in hospital waiting for one of her boys to get a broken bone or dislocated joint sorted. She’d still been glad when Magnum had booked a case on the actual night of Halloween anyway. One more layer of protection to wrap around the feeling she had been wrestling with since that damned dinner party. The feeling that something was wrong, something big, something she couldn’t fix.

So, when she woke up on what should have been a perfectly normal morning to shrieks of laughter, she hadn’t worried about it. The boys were up to something, they were having fun, all was good in the world. She padded over to her ensuite and took her time in the shower, not wanting to intrude on whatever was going on. 

When she did head down, strolling slowly across the grass and to the guest house, she was met by a room full of feathers.

"What on earth…?" 

Three faces looked up, one slightly guiltily.

"Oh, hey, Jules." Rick tried to hide the guilty expression behind a smile. "We were just… uh…" He looked to his friends as Higgins raised an eyebrow, but Magnum and T.C. avoided his gaze. "To be fair," he offered, "Thomas had it coming."

Higgins shook her head, fighting back a smile as the sight of her boys, tough ex-military men, sitting with feathers in their hair.

"You'll clean up, of course?" She did smile as all three of them nodded before walking away. 

For the rest of the day, at random intervals, laughter rang out around the estate. T.C. had stolen Magnum's towels, every single one of them, while he was in the shower. Magnum had offered Rick a beer only for a snake to fly out of the bottle when it was opened. It seemed her boys had decided it was the perfect time for a prank war. 

It was a sign of how far her relationship with them had come, how much she trusted them all, that it never occured to Higgins to worry that she might be the target of one of their pranks. They had promised, all those weeks back, that the main house was a no-go zone, and she believed them implicitly. She spent the day sorting out some pesky financial issues and catching up on a few bits and pieces of estate business that she had let slide for far too long. In her defense, she and Magnum had been chasing down a kidnapper. But still, work was work.

When she looked up from her laptop and realised the sun had set, she also realised her boys had been quiet for hours. She didn't think Rick and T.C. had left; at least, she hadn't heard any vehicles. She grabbed her cell and headed back over to the guest house, a vague plan of offering to order in for everyone forming in her mind. She was starving and she knew for a fact that Magnum's fridge was empty. 

In hindsight, she should have been more careful; a quiet Magnum was usually a dangerous Magnum, and that went double for Rick and T.C. And the three had been pulling ridiculous pranks all day. But she was feeling a little tired and her stomach was rumbling and all she was thinking of was the warm welcome she would get and the hot food she was hoping to order. 

She thought she heard a muffled noise as she stepped up to the guest house door but didn't pay it any mind, just knocked once and pushed the door open. A voice met her ears, dismay clear in it as it uttered "oh no," but then she was soaked, freezing water rushing over her. She gasped at the shock, water hitting the back of her throat, burning the sensitive skin, making her breath stick halfway down to her suddenly aching lungs.

And she was back on the lounger. Her wrists were tied again. Her legs were being pinned by brutish hands. There was pressure on her face, sodden cloth clinging to her mouth and nose. Water pouring over her. Filthy, freezing water flooding into her lungs. She couldn't breathe. Everything was cold and pain and fear and she couldn't breathe. She couldn't breathe!

She was running before she knew it. She wasn't tied down. There were no hands on her legs. But the water was still dripping down her back, falling from her hair, and every droplet made her heart squeeze into itself and lurch against her ribs. She needed to hide. 

She couldn't go through that again. The mind-numbing fear. Dying over and over, a little further into the dark every time before being dragged back by painful blows and forceful shakes. Every fibre of her being was panicking at the thought that any second now more water would crash down over her, steal what little breath she had. The hands would grip her ankles, bruises sinking into her skin. The zip ties would be back around her wrists, slicing into her, drawing blood. She couldn't handle it. Not even for Magnum could she do that again. She knew it. She knew this time it would break her. 

She needed to hide. She needed to get somewhere safe. She needed to get away. She needed to breathe. She couldn't do any of it. There was nowhere to hide; nowhere was safe. They had been everywhere. She and Kumu had taken them around. Shown them everything. They would find her. Wherever she went, they would find her and they would drag her back and drown her again and again and she would tell them. She would give them Magnum's name and he would be taken and it would be all her fault and she couldn't help it because she needed to breathe and she couldn't and she was so scared and her mind just wouldn't stop telling her over and over that she was going to die die die die…

Hands. 

Hands on her shoulders. 

They'd found her. 

Her mind stopped. Everything stopped. 

Everything shimmered and went black and the face in front of her blurred into Sam grinning as she choked, into Lina smirking as she refilled the bottle, into Magnum tal…

Magnum?

She blinked. The room stopped shimmering and the roaring in her ears, the rushing noise that had sounded so much like the pouring of water that had driven her fear higher and higher, suddenly became her own ugly gasps for breath. 

No Sam with his cruel grip on her, no Lina with her cold eyes, no lounger, no water... No water, she realised suddenly. No more water. But she still couldn't breathe. Magnum! He was right there, right in front of her, and she tried to beg him to help her. But she couldn't form the words. She couldn't get anything out past the tightness in her throat.

Something warm was over her hands, stopping them from shaking, and she looked down, forced her eyes to focus, and saw hands wrapped around hers. It was Magnum, she knew it, she told herself over and over, repeating his name like a mantra, looping it through her head.

“That’s it, girl. In and out, just like that.”

Magnum’s warm voice wrapped around her, and she suddenly realised her hands were being held against his chest. He was taking slow, deep breaths, exaggerating every movement of his body, and she was mimicking the rhythm of his breathing without even noticing.

“There you go; that’s better.” 

And, just like that, she realised what had been happening; the images of Sam and Lina, the feeling of the water slithering into her lungs, the remembered panic welling up until it became reality. She sucked in a breath and held it, ignoring the way her heart tried to jump, ignoring the way her lungs screamed for air. She swallowed hard, then let the breath out in a rush and instantly sucked in another, squeezing her eyes tightly closed as she held it for a second, knowing now that she had been hyperventilating, on the verge of a full blown-panic attack.

She stood that way for a while, not sure how long had passed, knowing only that she was feeling calmer, that Magnum was still with her, that her heart was slowing, that he was still holding her hands. When she finally opened her eyes again, it was to see Magnum looking at her with sympathy and understanding, rather than pity and concern like she had expected.

“How you doing now?” he asked, pitching his voice low. 

She took one last breath, focusing carefully on the inhale, before nodding.

“I think I’m all right now.” She tried for a smile and wasn’t at all sure she pulled it off, but he returned it anyway, letting go of her hands to hold her shoulders. She suddenly realised she was shaking, and it was all she could do not to crumple to the floor.

He must have felt her waver because he moved forwards, slipped one arm around her waist, and tucked her against his side.

“You wanna go up to bed?” If he was surprised by her vehement shake of the head, he didn’t show it, just nodded again. “I’m not leaving you here alone. I think Rick and T.C. are still in the guest house. That okay?”

She could tell from his voice that, if she said no, he would kick his friends out without hesitation. Or ignore them and sit with her here in the main house. She just gave him a grateful look and another nod, finding the idea of being surrounded by her boys was incredibly soothing.

They walked slowly, with Magnum uncomplainingly supporting more than half her weight as her knees kept threatening to buckle at each step. He kept murmuring encouragement to her too, telling her he was there, she was okay. The guest house was like a beacon in the darkness of the lawn, light spilling from the windows and open door, and every step closer made her feel a little better.

Rick and T.C. were sitting on the couch, both looking tense, and they jumped up as they heard the approaching footsteps.

“Jules,” Rick took a step towards them and then froze, looking oddly uncertain. “We were just… it was a prank. For Tommy.” His eyes slid over to a bucket, perched innocently on the table, and Higgins realised immediately what had happened.

“A bucket of water balanced on the door? Really?” Her voice was hoarse, pulling on her dry throat, but she managed to smile as she said it. She didn’t want anyone blaming themselves, after all, it wasn’t like they knew she had been waterboarded. The only person who knew that was Katsumoto, and that was only because he had taken her statement. 

She supposed, if it had affected her badly enough to drive her to a panic attack, she really should take the hint and tell someone else. She should definitely explain what had happened to her boys. Possibly even consult a professional of some sort. But, for now, she was aching and tired, and being carefully hustled over to the couch. A soft blanket appeared from somewhere, gentle hands tucking it so carefully around her, that she just couldn’t keep her eyes open, basking instead in the feeling of being so very safe.

Later, she decided, feeling a hint of a growl in her stomach, she would rouse herself and ask about food and share the story of her interrogation. She’d have a little nap first though. Her boys were chatting amongst themselves, and she let their voices wash away the last lingering traces of the fear and adrenaline. Somewhere, far away, she heard Magnum laugh at something, and it was the last little thing her mind needed to convince itself she really was safe. Between one breath and the next, she fell fast asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I will continue to be annoyed that we never got to see anyone react to what Higgins went through. I mean, yeah, it's Magnum's show, I get it. But nothing? Not even a quick check up with an EMT?


End file.
